Critical Essay by Welles T. Brandriff

SOURCE: "The Role of Order and Disorder in The Long March," in English Journal, January, 1967, pp. 54-9.

In this excerpt, Brandriff describes The Long March as the story of one man's tortured discovery of the disorder and chaos that underlie the surface of civilization.

There is a natural tendency to dwell upon the one-sided antagonism which springs up between Mannix and Templeton in The Long March, a short novel by William Styron. The conflict between the scarred man of history, and the marine colonel who deifies a system which produced many of these scars, is developed into a major theme in the book. But to contend that this is the most significant theme in the novel is to misrepresent the facts.

Certainly, it is true that Mannix "offers the extreme reaction" to the march [Melvin J. Friedman, "William...